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by Jim Holman.
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Joy -- Only For Mature Souls?

by Broderick Barker

C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce , which I have been reading to my wife, describes a battle between the residents of heaven and hell, waged on a plain somewhere between two. The aim of the former is to convert the helldwellers and lead them to heaven, that of the latter, to return to hell. What Lewis stresses over and over is the joy of heaven, the delight in entering bright reality, in contrast to the misery of hell and its powerful illusions. (I particularly liked the promise of pleasant dreams a hellish lizard makes to one of the lost.) Nearly all of the hell-dwellers are convinced that they are happier in hell than they ever could be in heaven, because in hell they are allowed to hold onto their sinful selves. Lewis makes joy attractive (a seemingly redundant exercise until you consider how often we reject it through sin). He recounts a saint from whom "the invitation to all joy, singing out of her whole being like a bird's song on an April evening, seemed to me such that no creature could resist it." After reading that particular passage about joy, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine (call him Tom) who converted, in part, through his reading of George Macdonald, Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton. I was lamenting the scarcity of reminders from the pulpit that man is sinful and in need of redemption. Without such reminders, I feared, people (like me) would forget just how much they needed Christ, and would consequently forget Him. They would almost certainly stop clinging to Him. If we have no sin, we don't need saving, and the central tenet of our faith ceases to have meaning. Personally, I said, I need to have my unworthiness before me always, so that I might remember Christ and His love for me. It keeps me grateful and humble, which helps keep me following Him. Tom looked perplexed. "That wasn't why I came into the Church at all," he replied. "What attracted me about Christianity was the joy." Today, his faith is in trouble -- so he tells my wife -- and I wonder if it isn't due in part to his conception of Christian life as joyful. I wonder if his joy has faded, and left him unsure of his belief. I tend to look on joy as something to be attained by the mature soul. When Paul says, "Count it all joy," I know it's something I cannot yet do. Suffering still drives me into myself, so that I ask for deliverance instead of giving thanks. What I can do is persevere, which may come more naturally to the cradle Catholic than the convert. This road has its own dangers -- fidelity isn't enough, of course; it must be the foundation upon which a real love of Christ is based. But I find it a more solid foundation than joy. Maybe that's because I don't properly understand what joy is. As I was thinking about Tom, about joy, about trudging along, I remembered another passage from Lewis' book, spoken by one of the saints: "There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself... there have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ." Or those who gave so much thought to a friend's crisis of faith that they forgot to pray for him. I said a Hail Mary, and asked God to bring Tom back.

Now I must ask Him to show me how I can be His instrument in that work. Tom's crisis of faith has helped me to recognize a persistent sin of omission on my part: the failure to treat people as fellow members of Christ's body, and instead, to regard them from a safe distance. I have always been adept at giving advice about what people can say to others in difficult situations, but far less so when it comes to saying something myself. The intimacy of contact involved in conversation about someone's faith life makes me uncomfortable. It seems -- I blush to admit it -- almost distasteful. I am wary of people who cheerfully preach to anyone they meet. A man stopped my wife and I outside of Mass and asked us to give his daughter a call -- she was about to get married to a non-Catholic, and he feared for her faith. What to say? "Hi, you don't know me, but..." (We still have the number.) Tom is not anyone. He is a friend -- not quite an intimate, but much more than an acquaintance. It seems clear that he has been put into my life, and I have avoided doing much about it. I console myself with thoughts of prayer and good example being real helps, but I fear something more is needed. Once, I invited him to confession, and he accepted. But that was once, and it didn't involve intimate contact. I need God to direct me, to inspire me, to act through me. I can't do it.

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